This chapter identifies four systemic barriers to meaningful citizen participation: shared understanding, coordination, alignment, and accountability. It emphasises the need to adopt the citizen’s perspective when assessing these challenges and devising measures to tackle them. Despite significant accumulated experience and high expectations for the future, a lack of coordination and inconsistent practices hinder meaningful citizen participation today. The chapter calls for a renewed focus on overcoming institutional silos, creating shared goals, and ensuring that citizen participation processes are trustworthy, equitable and deliver impact.
Exploring New Frontiers in Citizen Participation in the Policy Cycle
Abstract
Democracy depends at a minimum on knowing who is making decisions and having some sense of who you might complain to, and how you might kick them out. Power has to be legible for anyone to have a feeling of agency (Mulgan, 2024[1]).
Recognising the challenges and limits of citizen participation in policymaking. Putting citizens at the heart of policymaking means considering people’s time, attention, experiential expertise and energy as a valuable asset. It also requires clarity about the limits of citizen participation and how accountability for citizens’ inputs will be ensured.
Identify the systemic challenges facing citizen participation by putting the citizen at the centre. Growing, but fragmented, opportunities to participate in the policy cycle across different branches of government and different levels of governance raise additional challenges for citizens, elected representatives, and civil servants alike. These include: the need for a shared understanding of citizen participation in the policy cycle; co-ordination among public institutions within and across levels of governance; alignment between the ‘front office’ and the ‘back office’ of public institutions; and ensuring accountability for citizen participation. Adopting a citizen’s perspective when looking at how the system works in practice offers valuable insights for better design.
Consider citizen participation ecosystems as dynamic. Through a gradual process of evolution, rather than revolution, hybrid pathways of citizen participation are emerging whereby participatory and deliberative processes develop alongside, and are deployed in combination with, long-established mechanisms of representative democracy. Fostering an iterative approach to citizen participation and recursive representation in policymaking will require more attention to monitoring performance and impact over time as well as renewed efforts to boost inclusion and flexibility.
This section offers a model of citizen-centered policymaking and identifies four systemic challenges for meaningful citizen participation throughout the policy cycle:
Challenge #1: Developing a shared understanding of citizen participation in the policy cycle
Challenge #2: Co-ordination among public institutions within and across levels of governance;
Challenge #3: Alignment between the “front office” and the “back office” of public institutions;
Challenge #4: Ensuring accountability for citizen participation throughout the policy cycle.
Within a democracy, citizens are the source of the legitimate exercise of public power. They are free to choose whether and when to engage actively in the development, implementation, and oversight of public policy – which might be often, occasionally, or not at all. Given that everyone’s lives are touched by some aspect of public policy, citizens must have the opportunity to voice their preferences, contribute their perspectives, share their experiences and take action to build their collective future. Respect for the principles of equity, dignity and agency is key.
The public institutions exercising legislative, executive, judicial and oversight functions in a democracy are responsible for achieving public policy outcomes while ensuring due process and accountability. Citizen participation contributes to both: by providing valuable input to enrich public policy and by providing legitimacy and grounds for trust in the policy process itself.
However, it is important to recognise the limits of citizen participation. In a democracy, public institutions are expected to exercise their decision-making powers in the public interest, within the bounds of their delegated authority and amenable to ex ante and ex post control by citizens. The daily business of running a national government would not be helped by “24/7 citizen participation” nor is it what citizens have either the time or desire for. Recognising this underscores both the importance of people’s trust in public institutions, as measured by the OECD Trust Survey, but also the reverse: “Trust works both ways, if the government wants to be trusted by the people, it must itself start to trust the people.” (Demos, 2024[2])
The executive branch must balance the demands of vertical accountability to democratically elected heads of government and ministers in the executive branch (who are themselves answerable to legislatures) with, in parallel, horizontal accountability between public institutions and ongoing efforts to ensure social accountability towards citizens (Forster, Malena and Singh, 2004[3]). This eternal balancing act, if rendered explicit and amenable to public discussion and challenge, can itself be a dynamic source of institutional innovation (OECD, 2020[4]). Efforts to “democratize democracy” by balancing valuable technocratic expertise with citizens’ “experiential” insights and daily contributions to achieving policy goals (as stakeholders in specific policy outcomes) as well as their values and aspirations (as citizens contributing to shaping public goods) will require not only political commitment, financial resources, and time. It will require a new set of skills, aptitudes and values among both civil servants and elected officials – as well as citizens themselves.
Nonetheless, it is important to recognise that despite well-established legal provisions, clear policy frameworks and decades of accumulated experience in many countries, citizen participation often fails to materialise, be meaningful or create measurable improvements in either policy design and outcomes or other outcome metrics, such as public acceptability or trust in government. In order to ensure meaningful participation, it is first necessary to consider the systemic challenges that are getting in the way of greater progress.
To explore the main systemic challenges to delivering meaningful citizen participation, this section adopts a functional model that puts citizens at the centre of policymaking. It adopts an ‘asset’ rather than a ‘deficit’ approach which values the autonomy, agency, resources and contributions of individual citizens in promoting the public interest, providing and protecting common goods and contributing to positive policy outcomes - beyond their role as people with a ‘stake’ in a given policy outcome (see Figure 2.1).
This approach embodies a paradigm shift by adopting a citizen’s perspective when looking at opportunities for citizen participation on offer across the policy-making cycle and through each of the branches of government (executive, legislature, judiciary and independent public institutions). It seeks to distinguish between those available in theory (de jure) and those that are actually used (de facto) to ensure a strong focus on effective use, inclusion and impact. This functional model goes well beyond the scope of the executive branch alone and is grounded in the 2017 OECD Open Government Recommendation (OECD, 2017[5]) definition of an “Open State”:
“when the executive, legislature, judiciary, independent public institutions, and all levels of government – recognising their respective roles, prerogatives, and overall independence according to their existing legal and institutional frameworks – collaborate, exploit synergies and share good practices and lessons learned among themselves and with other stakeholders to promote transparency, integrity, accountability, and stakeholder participation, in support of democracy and inclusive growth.”
It should be noted that the functional model set out in this Discussion Paper is offered as a potentially useful device for exploring the new frontiers of citizen participation in the policy cycle – it is neither a prescriptive framework nor a roadmap. Furthermore, it does not seek to encompass the enabling conditions that influence citizen participation upstream (e.g. demographic and socio-economic context, civil society and civic space) nor does it extend downstream to the wider impact of citizen participation beyond the policy cycle (e.g. resilience of democratic institutions, social cohesion). While important, these elements go beyond the scope of this paper and would require further analysis.
The functional model is composed of three interlocking components:
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Citizens: are at the heart of the model which recognises their goals, self-efficacy, autonomy, resources, motivations, drivers, capacities and skills as well as the barriers (intrinsic and extrinsic) they face when engaging in the public policy cycle. This component indicates the main actor in the “citizen participation ecosystem”. |
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Branches: the four main branches consist of the executive, legislature, and judicial branches of government as well as the independent public institutions (e.g. Supreme Audit Institutions, Ombuds institutions) with whom citizens can engage to achieve their goals. This component defines the key public institutions that interface with citizens. |
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Policy cycle: the five key stages of agenda-setting, policy formulation, decision-making, implementation and evaluation of public policy in which citizens may choose to engage. The agenda-setting stage involves the emergence of widespread recognition that a problem exists in the public domain as well as the need to remedy it. The policy formulation stage encompasses the development of policy options to address the problem. The decision-making stage refers to the adoption of binding legislation, policy, regulation, by-laws and decrees. The implementation stage includes all actions aimed at applying decisions in practice, once taken. Evaluation refers to all activities whose aim is to assess the process, impact and outcomes of implementation. This component provides a temporal dimension to the system. |
From a citizen’s perspective, understanding how to exercise one’s voice and choice at each stage of the policy cycle and identifying the right institutional ‘doors’ on which to knock is a significant hurdle. So, making the policy process “legible” for citizens is a precondition for meaningful participation (Mulgan, 2024[1]). Citizens have several options at their disposal when they do decide to participate. They can choose to act in first person or to delegate the task of representing their views and interests to other actors, such as civil society organisations (CSOs), trade unions and business associations.
Applying the functional model with a critical lens identifies four systemic challenges:
Challenge #1: developing a shared understanding of citizen participation in the policy cycle
Challenge #2: co-ordination among public institutions within and across levels of governance;
Challenge #3: alignment between the “front office” and the “back office” of public institutions;
Challenge #4: ensuring accountability for citizen participation throughout the policy cycle.
2.5.1. Challenge #1 – Developing a shared understanding of meaningful citizen participation
While recognising the importance of individual country contexts, constitutional settings and policy objectives, the OECD has played a longstanding role in fostering dialogue among Member countries to reach a shared understanding of what citizen participation in policymaking is and can do.
Under the impetus of its Member countries, the OECD has adopted a broad and inclusive approach to the definition of ‘citizens’ which are defined as: “Individuals, regardless of their age, gender, sexual orientation, religious, and political affiliations. The term is meant in the larger sense of ‘an inhabitant of a particular place’, which can be in reference to a village, town, city, region, state, or country depending on the context. It is not meant in the more restrictive sense of ‘a legally recognised national of a state’. In this larger sense, it is equivalent of people" (OECD, 2022[6])1. The 2017 OECD Recommendation of the Council on Open Government recognises not only that citizen participation is a right, but that it can help improve the design and implementation of public policy and services, support public understanding, the legitimacy of decisions taken and democracy at large (see Box 2.1).
Notwithstanding this common ground, many policy makers still consider citizen participation as an aspirational goal, an afterthought or an optional extra and struggle to understand what it would mean to put citizens at the heart of policymaking. This is not a matter of semantics or academic debate, but a systemic challenge. As the 2024 OECD Trust Survey demonstrates, many countries are falling short of their citizens’ expectations for meaningful participation.
The 2017 OECD Recommendation of the Council on Open Government defines citizen engagement as when: “citizens and stakeholders are given the opportunity and the necessary resources (e.g., information, data, and digital tools) to collaborate during all phases of the policy-cycle. It acknowledges equal standing for citizens in setting the agenda, proposing project or policy options and shaping the dialogue – although the responsibility for the final decision or policy formulation in many cases rests with public authorities” (OECD, 2017[5]). It distinguishes among three levels of citizen participation, which differ according to the level of involvement:
1. Information: an initial level of participation characterised by a one-way relationship in which the government produces and delivers information to citizens and stakeholders. It covers both on demand provision of information and “proactive” measures by the government to disseminate information.
2. Consultation: a more advanced level of participation that entails a two-way relationship in which citizens and stakeholders provide feedback to the government and vice-versa. It is based on the prior definition of the issue for which views are being sought and requires the provision of relevant information, in addition to feedback on the outcomes of the process.
3. Engagement: when citizens and stakeholders are given the opportunity and the necessary resources (e.g. information, data, and digital tools) to collaborate during all phases of the policy cycle and in service design and delivery. It acknowledges equal standing for citizens in setting the agenda, proposing project or policy options and shaping the dialogue – although the responsibility for the final decision or policy formulation in many cases rests with public authorities
Source: OECD Council Recommendation on Open Government (2017)
Efforts to better understand the changing drivers, motivations, expectations, and behaviours of citizens today will be essential to adapting policymaking processes under representative democracies and ensuring their resilience in the future. Just as there is no such thing as a ‘generic citizen’ in increasingly diverse societies, there can be no ‘one size fits all’ approach to participation. Providing inclusive formats for participation that recognise and value diversity will be key to success. Drawing upon the latest findings in applied research in behavioural insights, it is possible to account for the influence of economic, social, political, and cultural preferences on shaping and shifting human behaviour while reaffirming citizens’ agency. Behavioural insights help government focus their limited resources on policy designs that have the greatest chance of success (OECD, 2024[7]). Ultimately, a better understanding how people think and act with regards to specific policy challenges that affect their lives – as well as the opportunities on offer to actively engage in solving them – will also help design more meaningful citizen participation processes.
Developing a shared understanding of the core role of citizen participation within public institutions, across levels of government and throughout society is not a ‘one off’ activity but requires ongoing dialogue about its goals, scope, format and impact. Fostering a shared strategic vision for citizen participation which can underpin innovative practice in the field to meet the evolving needs of policy makers and citizens alike remains a challenge for many countries.
2.5.2. Challenge #2 – Co-ordination of citizen participation among public institutions within and across levels of governance
Paradoxically, this challenge is exacerbated by a positive trend. Namely the proliferation of opportunities for citizen participation on offer by public institutions – not only at the national level but also at the subnational and international levels.
Horizontal co-ordination of citizen participation at the national level
Knowing when and how to exercise one’s rights to participate in complex modern democracies is a challenge for many people. From a citizen’s perspective, the opportunities to participate in the policymaking cycle are multiple and disparate. Yet rarely are citizens presented with a full and regularly updated menu of options on how they can get involved and when. They may have a range of legitimate questions such as: how do I register for an upcoming election or referendum and what are the ways I can cast my vote? How do I petition parliament or kickstart a popular legislative initiative? When will the next public consultation be held on the topics of most interest to me? What does it mean to be part of a citizens’ assembly? How can I make a practical contribution to achieving the public policy goals that resonate the most with me? When I don’t agree with policy choices, what are the avenues of appeal and recourse available to me?
Many national governments overlook or discount the need to better co-ordinate their citizen participation initiatives between line ministries within the executive branch, and between the executive and legislature during the agenda-setting and policy formulation stages. Yet from a citizen’s perspective, multiple invitations to participate issued by different ministries and public agencies on what appears to be similar or overlapping policy issues or at multiple stages of the policy process can look a lot like ‘institutional amnesia’ and contributes to ‘consultation fatigue’.
While country contexts vary greatly, there is scope to enhance the established mechanisms of representative democracy through the judicious and appropriate use of direct, participatory and deliberative democratic practices – all of which can help make citizens’ participation more meaningful. To do so will require greater attention to mapping, then co-ordinating, the ‘pathways’ by which citizens’ aspirations and preferences can be voiced – and accounted for – in the policy cycle.
No doubt there will be limits to co-ordination. Indeed, the separation of powers itself poses natural limits to co-ordination among the four branches – who must remain independent if they are to discharge their respective missions and roles. Nonetheless, it is likely that the role of oversight exercised by the legislature, judiciary and independent institutions (e.g. Ombuds institutions, Supreme Audit institutions) would also be facilitated by more co-ordinated approaches to citizen participation in policymaking.
Recognising the tensions and trade-offs that can arise as a result of citizen participation at the national level via the executive, legislature, judiciary and independent institutions is an important first step when designing a ‘citizen participation ecosystem’ that can foster positive reinforcement of – while reducing friction with – established mechanisms of ensuring accountability to citizens in representative democracies such as via legislatures, audit institutions and ultimately, the ballot box.
Vertical co-ordination of citizen participation across levels of governance: subnational, national and international
Multi-level governance is both a reality in many policy fields and a necessity in others: addressing policy challenges can span levels of government within a given country or can even require co-ordinated efforts across national borders. If identifying the locus of decision-making within a single level of governance is often difficult for citizens, this challenge becomes even greater under the real-life conditions of multilevel governance. – making the exercise of power ‘illegible’ to citizens (Mulgan, 2024[1]).
Two trends are pulling in opposite directions. “Downwards” through decentralisation, application of the principle of subsidiarity and the delegation of powers to subnational governments and “upwards” through efforts to co-ordinate countries’ policy responses to global challenges and shocks at the international and global levels. Nonetheless, multilevel governance can be made more transparent, accountable and amenable to citizen participation.
Firstly, via application of the “subsidiarity principle” which calls for decisions to be made at the level closest to citizens, whenever possible (e.g. as expressed by Article 5(3) of the Treaty on European Union). This specific case is just one of many in a broader movement towards the decentralisation of powers and responsibilities which has been underway in all OECD countries for many years. The aim in each case is to better respond to citizens’ needs and challenges, which vary depending on where they live and how they experience public policies (OECD, 2019[8]) (OECD, 2022[9]). The propensity to engage with citizens at the local level is reflected in the OECD Deliberative Democracy Database which features 733 cases collected worldwide of which 63% take place at the local level (OECD, 2024[10]).
Secondly, by building robust ‘transmission belts’ that will convey the input and insights gathered via citizen participation conducted at one level of the overall governance system to all relevant others. This calls for a flexible and ‘nested approach’ which respects the legitimate exercise of power of elected governments and assemblies at each level, while offering multiple opportunities for citizen participation, as needed.
Citizens are faced with difficult trade-offs. They have only limited time and attention to devote to the ‘civic act’ of participation in the policy process, given mounting time pressures in their daily lives of work, family care and leisure. So where can they achieve the greatest impact? Generally speaking, the local level offers citizens the most accessible interface, tighter feedback loops and visible outcomes. Yet citizens’ insights, time and energy are also precious resources for policy makers at the national and international levels – who will clearly have to work far harder to overcome the barriers of distance.
Traditionally, and still today, the subnational level offers the greatest ‘return on investment’ for citizens, given its proximity and ability to demonstrate more immediate and tangible impacts of their participation. So, it is not surprising that citizen participation processes undertaken by cities and regions often see higher take-up rates, more sustained participation over time and generate higher trust levels than national governments.
This is reflected in the OECD Deliberative Democracy Database which collects cases of representative deliberative processes (such as citizens’ assemblies, councils, and juries) in which randomly selected citizens are invited by a public authority to learn, deliberate, and come up with informed recommendations to address concrete public problems. The database contains 733 registered cases, with 465 taking place at a local level, 150 at a regional level, 101 at the national level, and 17 at the international level (OECD, consulted September 2024[11]).
More recently, growing public recognition of the impacts of globalisation on well-being and daily life (e.g. at work, as consumers and in the enjoyment of a healthy natural environment) has led citizens to focus on the role of international organisations and their interactions with national policymaking.
Policy making processes at the international level have for many decades been the exclusive preserve of the national executive branch, with only limited input or oversight by members of national legislatures acting as the citizens’ elected representatives – let alone by individual citizens themselves. Yet in recent years, opportunities for citizen participation at the international level have opened up, enabled by digitalisation and in response to twin pressures on international institutions: first, to ensure greater transparency and public accountability; and second, to demonstrate a strong evidence base for their operations (e.g. developing international policy and regulatory frameworks, monitoring instruments, development assistance programmes and public infrastructure investments) (OECD, 2023[12]).
Citizen participation processes serve both purposes and have multiplied in various international (e.g. European Union) and global arenas (e.g. the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change UNFCCC). Most often citizens’ voices are conveyed by civil society organisations (CSOs), acting as their ‘social representatives’, and on occasion they are solicited directly (e.g. via the Global Citizens Assembly held in 2021 ahead of the COP26) (Curato, 2023[13]). Making citizen participation inclusive and meaningful at all levels will be key to tackling the climate crisis and other global challenges.
While it is safe to say that the implications of globalisation for the design of multilevel citizen participation processes are not fully understood, what is clear is that the growing need for co-ordinated responses to existential planetary threats goes hand in hand with the imperative to design meaningful multilevel governance approaches to citizen participation – spanning from the local to the national and international. Only by enabling and empowering citizens to share their energy, ingenuity and insights will the objectives set out in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ever be achieved. This new frontier is one which will require imagination, vision, experimentation and concerted efforts by public institutions, civil society, businesses, trade unions and citizens themselves.
2.5.3. Challenge #3 - Aligning the “front office” and the “back office” of public institutions
To meet citizens’ rising expectations, public institutions have made significant investments in the design of their public-facing interface with individual citizens. They have built up their “front office” functions in a range of areas including providing open access to data, responses to access to information requests, proactive public communications, in-person and online consultations, and deliberative citizen assemblies to name but a few. Rather less attention has been focused on the need to align the “back office” and “front office” of public institutions to ensure that they offer opportunities for meaningful citizen participation that have real impact and for which they will be held accountable. The inner workings of the state and the core public administration functions of budgeting, rulemaking (regulations), public procurement, civil service management, internal and external audit, often appear opaque and misaligned with the timing, content and iterative feedback loops required by an effective interface with citizens.
This challenge focuses on the functional design of public institutions themselves and can be described in terms of a simple, but clear, distinction between their:
“front office” functions which cover all public-facing activities such as public communications, responses to access to information requests, consultations, participatory processes and deliberative assemblies. These functions are generally more amenable to regular updates, tailoring to user needs and iterative development. With sufficient resources, the front office can be equipped to adopt new formats (in person/online), technologies (telephone/social media) and timings (synchronous/asynchronous) in response to citizen preferences.
“back office” functions which include internal processes such as public financial management and accounting, preparation of regulatory impact assessments, drafting of legislation and decrees, procurement, infrastructure planning, provision of in-service training, performance management and audit. These functions are generally ‘hard wired’ into public institutions and are often defined by specific laws or regulations, place high value on administrative certainty and are subject to strong scrutiny.
From a citizen’s perspective, the only visible part of a public institution is the interface provided by the “front office”. The only encounter they have with the “back office” functions are indirect, and only insofar as they impact upon the design, availability and reactivity of the public-facing interface.
By way of example, a public institution such as a government agency or a standing committee of the legislature might be keen on understanding citizens’ views on an emerging policy issue at the ‘agenda-setting’ stage. They might decide to commission an opinion poll, set up a focus group, hold a public hearing or solicit input and ideas via a dedicated online portal. Yet even the best efforts to craft an open and accessible participatory process early in the policy process (the ‘front office’) will be undermined if the limits within which policy responses can be designed (set by the ‘back office’) are not communicated clearly (for example, available fiscal resources or qualified staff, constitutional guardrails, legislative calendars, and existing international obligations) (see Figure 2.5 above).
Similar examples of misalignment could be found for each stage in the policy cycle, and for each of the four key public institutions of executive, legislature, judiciary and independent institutions. While they can take many forms, often the ‘front office’ and the ‘back office’ functions are misaligned in terms of:
Incentives: while all civil servants generally share the core values of respect and commitment to democracy underpinning the public service, those working in public-facing functions have greater contact with, understanding of and reason to respond to citizens’ expectations than do colleagues who are shielded from regular interactions with the public.
Metrics: how performance is measured differs substantially between the front and back-office functions, with a higher premium on measurable public uptake and engagement in the former and compliance with rules of procedure in the latter.
Skills: while modern public sector competence frameworks recognize the importance of a common core of transversal skills for all job families, nonetheless the specific skills set required by civil servants engaged in outward-facing functions differ significantly from those of colleagues managing core operations in the back office.
Recognising the need for greater alignment does not mean accepting the inevitable immobility of ‘back office’ functions, nor that the vital ‘front office’ with which citizens interact needs to fall in line. Rather, it calls into question the current paradigm under which the limits of our public institutions and their management of the citizen participation interface during policymaking are taken as a given – to which citizens must simply adapt. Shifting the balance and redirecting efforts towards greater alignment will also require leadership and political will.
If citizens’ trust in public institutions is to be restored, the focus should now be on how to ensure that the core functions of a modern public administration such as budgeting, fiscal reporting, procurement, audit and civil service leadership can be explicitly designed to support effective citizen participation – as an integral function of modern democratic governance. The OECD's longstanding work programme on public budgeting reflects renewed attention to the importance of empowering public understanding. After so many decades of accumulated experience, citizen participation can no longer be seen as an afterthought, a ‘nice to have’ or an eternal experiment.
2.5.4. Challenge #4 – Ensuring accountability for citizen participation throughout the policy cycle
This challenge emerges from the temporal sequencing of the policy cycle, which is itself often iterative. Naturally enough, the journey from the initial identification of a problem which is amenable to public policy all the way through to policy design, adoption, implementation and evaluation is a long and winding road. Under a best-case scenario, there would be multiple opportunities for citizen participation along the way, each designed to suit the particular needs of the moment.
Ideally, the time, effort and insights from personal experience contributed by citizens at each stage of the policy cycle would be treated as a valuable gift and precious asset that would be accounted for and “travel” alongside the policy under development to frame its design, inform decision-makers choices, guide implementation, serve as a baseline for monitoring and evaluation and remain as part of the public record.
Far too often, the results of citizen participation are hard to discern in the immediate aftermath – let alone further down the line. While striving for complete coherence in citizen participation throughout the policy cycle is perhaps an unreasonable aspiration, expecting accountability for citizens’ input is not.
Citizens need to have a clear overview of the entire policy process, what stage of the policymaking cycle they are contributing to, whatever limits there may be to their participation, and what will happen to their input further downstream.
The importance of clearly communicating the limits of citizens participation at each stage of the policy process is paramount. Broadly speaking, the further upstream or downstream from the decision-making phase, the wider the scope for citizen input. Unless explicitly delegated to citizens (for example through participatory budgeting or conditional cash transfers) within a representative democracy, the powers of decision-making lie with the elected government of the day. Civil servants can face dilemmas in reconciling the legitimate requirements of ‘vertical accountability’ to democratically elected ministers and those of horizontal ‘social accountability’ to citizens via participation processes. Accountability for citizen participation starts with making clear the ‘rules of the game’ (OECD, 2022[14]).
As defined in the 2001 OECD report Citizens as Partners, “Governments have an obligation to account for the use they make of citizens’ inputs received through feedback, public consultation and active participation” (OECD, 2001[15]). Accountability for citizens’ contributions to shaping, implementing and evaluating public policy entails, at a minimum, a clear description of the inputs received, and the steps taken (or not taken) by public institutions as a result (e.g. a via publicly available ‘participation log’). The ‘giving reasons’ requirement is especially critical in those cases where citizens input is not ultimately incorporated into the policy. Many valid constraints exist that can reduce the scope or impact of citizen participation (e.g. constitutional requirements, pre-existing international treaty obligations, technical or financial feasibility) but these too need to be clearly stated as part of the public record.
While in most cases transparency and accountability regarding the bounded nature of citizen participation within the framework of representative democracy by giving reasons for imposing these limits will suffice. Of course, in a democracy, the legal foundations for these limits must themselves be open to challenge, legal recourse and legislative action. For example, legal limits on the scope of access to information regulations can be changed through judicial review or new legislation adopted by parliament.
Ensuring that citizens can fully exercise their democratic rights to participate in policymaking on key issues that affect their lives in a meaningful way that has demonstrable impact is an ambitious goal. Achieving it will require concerted action to tackle the four systemic challenges of shared understanding, co-ordination, alignment and accountability identified in this section. The next section will explore how countries may do so by taking action on four fronts: better targeting participatory practices, lowering barriers, boosting capacity and ensuring that citizen participation delivers impact while guaranteeing accountability.
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← 1. The Republic of Türkiye dissociates itself from the expression of sexual orientation throughout the document. Türkiye understands the concept of gender as a complete analogue of the word "sex” in accordance with the binary biological concept of female and male.